The walks that made me

A predominant memory of my childhood was walking to places with Dad. I mean bakeries, restaurants, school, churches, playgrounds - any place where we could pause for sometime, before resuming our walks again.

Maybe, Dad felt that being at home wasn’t going to be as fruitful for us, as for the other families. They could be attaining new peaks of peace, harmony or happiness within the four walls of their homes while, Dad, estranged from my mother, would’ve just twiddled his thumbs with me for company at home.

Home for us, was dull. Walking gave us somewhere to get to. I don’t remember much else about home but I remember how Dad and I would trudge those roads in Guwahati, almost every day. It was not as lockstep as it sounds because I was only five or six and might have not really trudged as much as having seen the world perched from his shoulders.

Nevertheless, I remember being out on walks so much more than being at home. So when Dad got his first Bajaj scooter in Guwahati (with a number plate that’s imprinted on my mind - AXA 693), I don’t recall being overjoyed by it. Whenever we’d go out now, standing in the front, my eyes would stay transfixed on that round speedometer. It was tiny. Any modern wrist watch’s dial could put it to shame but the changing numbers of speed and distance in front of me kept me busy and guessing.

With those scooter rides, gone were the long gazes at the bakeries with cream rolls, TV showrooms with Onidas stacked against glass facades and toyshops that housed Hot Wheels and He-Man miniatures. Those indulgences we would momentarily stop and marvel at on our walks, were out of our lives with this scooter in tow.

We changed cities soon and came to Jaipur and the scooter from Guwahati was no more momentarily. The walks now happened around the dusty lanes of Bhawani Nagar in either scorching heat or bitter cold. Thanks to a semblance of a park nearby, our evening walks began leisurely, but as I learnt to pedal, Dad walked beside me until I could comfortably cycle. Slowly, I was beginning to leave him behind, even as he would watch me go around the park. Once I’d completed a couple of rounds, I would alight from my cycle and we’d walk home together.

From there, we went to Hapur and Ghaziabad, then Najibabad and then we came back again to Ghaziabad. We weren’t in the armed forces, but it felt like it. By now, Dad had upgraded from our Bajaj Super of yore, to a Chetak and we even went as far as a Vespa in a couple of years but by now Dad was running out of fuel. Dad had had enough and wanted to stop living like a nomad. He moved to a new small town, a couple of hours drive from Trivandrum, called Punalur. Moving to Kerala was meant to make him feel closer to his roots.

I don’t think he sold Punalur to me well, when he said, ‘It’s the hottest town in Kerala, per some records and the rainiest too.’

The scooter went out of our life again and in the evenings, we would often walk to and from Dad’s modest Trading Business called MGM Associates - so named after a patron saint, more commonly known as Parumala Thirumeni (the Bishop of Parumala), that Dad and our extended family had immense belief and faith in. We definitely had some blessings from Parumala Thirumeni, because Dad’s modest setup paid for my senior school, graduate education and living expenses all through till my Masters, when I took a loan.

It’s uncanny that by that time I felt I had outgrown a bicycle, Dad perhaps, felt he had outgrown owning a scooter. Dad’s office was about a couple of kilometers from our home so often after school, I would head to Dad’s office and then we’d walk back together home. Our frequency of walks skyrocketed.

We didn’t have to pause on any showrooms en route on my account anymore but once in a while, Dad would wonder if we’d ever be able to afford a Maruti 800 whenever he’d pass a car showroom. For him, those gleaming four-wheelers, tied in silver ribbons might have begun to mean, what those He-Man miniatures meant for me back then in Guwahati — objects outside our economic flexibility.

Instead, conversation stirred our walks. We’d cover politics, grammar, careers, sport, family, nostalgia, and once in a while, I’d try to understand what we were trying to accomplish by being in the hottest and rainiest town of Kerala.

It was around the last year of my graduation when I was twenty, that I first felt that Dad and I had different ideas on what I should do for my career. He was keen that I either manage MGM Associates or become a CA, while I wanted to pursue an MBA. After much deliberation and conflict, I said no to both of his choices, and left Punalur to work as a customer support executive with Dell in Bangalore, while simultaneously preparing for my MBA Entrance exams. That was in 2003.

Time flew and Dad passed in 2020 and in between those years, I never spent more than a week at home at one stretch with Dad. My MBA and work subsequently took me to Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore in those years.

I’d visit a couple of times every year but our walks became fewer. Somehow, Dad just about scraped enough to fulfil a long-cherished dream of buying a silver Maruti 800 sometime back then. So whenever I would visit home, we’d now instead go on long drives, almost unfailingly at least once to the church of Parumala Thirumeni and the trips back and forth to the airport which was a couple of hours away from home, still gave me enough time and space to discuss sport, grammar, careers and family.

We’d even get nostalgic about our walks on those drives.

‘How much we walked?’ one of us would ask metaphorically and the other would be amazed by how much we did. We’d never tire of this question. It was our badge of honor and we wanted to show off, even if to each other, that we didn’t forget.

From 2016 however, he left driving. The Parkinsons wasn’t helping and he had also given up on working full time. But now, whenever I visited, our walks resumed, albeit for much shorter distances. His legs gradually were becoming unsteady but we would step out and walk on our rather quiet lane in Punalur till we reached a pithy stall that survived on selling trinkets, tea and chips.

It was probably only a hundred meters away. We would pause there and he’d introduce me to that rather old shop-owner himself, saying, ‘Ende magan.. (My son)…’ and the shop owner would acknowledge knowing me. We might have repeated this routine perhaps ten odd times between 2016 and 2019.

The last I met him in Feb 2020, he didn’t have it in him to walk even that much and while the pandemic was yet to set in, I had somehow begun to believe that I had walked the last with my Dad already.

So this time, we sat hand in hand, and he started talking and telling me about the state of the world, how English is a funny language, how Kerala’s politics is in good hands because there’s always a strong opposition, and why he thought Vishy was a better batsman than Gavaskar and how we must always be punctual in life and be kind to everyone in the world.

I had heard all of those instances and anecdotes, a hundred times before.

I just nodded, like I hadn’t.

And then, out of the blue, he asked me, ‘You remember, how much we walked?’

‘Oh gosh! I do, Dad, I do.’

‘How much we walked, Dad!’ I repeated and held his hands tighter than ever.